Marilyn in Parade sets the following problem. You are in a pitch dark room. You are handed a deck that has ten cards turned face up shuffled into it. Your job is to sort the deck into two piles, each of which contains the same number of up-turned cards.

The solution involves no night-vision goggles or the ability to read through one’s fingers. It’s just so damn clever that you’re going to go D’oh when you turn the column upside down and read her answer.

Or, you could click here to get a javascript popup with the answer.

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I’m no statistician — in fact, I’m no someone who’s ever gotten a statistic right — but doesn’t “margin of error” actually mean something?

Here’s MSNBC’s coverage of the latest poll of Democrats and “democratic leaners” [Forgot the capital, eh?] from Newsweek. The question seems to have been: Which Democrat do you support for President?

Clark: 14%
Dean: 12%
Lieberman: 12%
Kerry: 10%
Gephardt: 8%

Margin of error: plus or minus three points.

MSNBC’s conclusion: “Retired Gen. Wesley Clark may have only entered the presidential race on Thursday, but he is already the Democratic frontrunner…”

Shouldn’t the actual headline be:

Now, lest you think I’m merely defending my boy Howie, let me hasten to add that the report continues: “The president?s approval rating now stands at 51 percent, down 1 point from last week?s poll…” Again, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the actual result of the poll that the president’s approval rating has not changed in a statistically significant way? That Bush’s overall approval rating was at 65% in May is another story, and that his rating for his handling of the War in Iraq slid five points to 46% in a week is an even bigger story.

I think MSNBC came to the wrong conclusion with these numbers as well: Dean fared worse (52% to 38%) than Clark (47% to 43%) and Kerry (48% to 43%) when matched up against Bush. Certainly MSNBC is just plain wrong when it says that “Clark fared better than the others” because of a 1% difference against Bush. But isn’t the difference between 38 and 43 statistically insignificant if the margin of error is plus or minus 3?

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Michael O’Connor Clarke, Ireland’s gift to Canada, writes:

Could P2P music sharing actually be considered legal in Canada? This tech journalist thinks so, and he makes an interesting argument. He’s not a lawyer, of course – but it’s an entertaining thought.

Apparently, five years ago, Canada legalized copying of copyrighted material for private use, levying a fee on blank CDs and audio tapes of $0.77 CDN and $0.29 respectively to compensate the studios. So far, that’s raised $70M. According to the article:

… you could not have designed a law which more perfectly captures the peer to peer process. “Private copying” is a term of art in the Act. In Canada, if I own a CD and you borrow it and make a copy of it that is legal private copying; however, if I make you a copy of that same CD and give it to you that would be infringement. Odd, but ideal for protecting file sharers.

Loophole or proof of the sly wisdom of those snow-shod Canadians?

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Cory is encouraging IEEE members to urge that organization to fly right in its recommendations on electronic voting machines. The EFF is pushing the issue. (You are a member, aren’t you?) Cory writes:

The people who are writing the IEEE standard for voting
machines have been doing their best to rig their deliberative process
ot exclude input from non-vendors who want the standard to include
performance metrics that will guard against electoral malfeasance. This
is heavy stuff: the standard this committee produces will likely form
the basis of the US goverment’s voting-machine purchases (as well as
those of governments abroad), and if there are holes in the standard
today, they will be biting our democracies on the ass for decades.
There’s never been a clearer demonstration that “architecture is
politics.”

We have to get this right. It cuts to our faith in the legitimacy of elections. Lose that and you lose democracy.

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David Isenberg in his new blog comments on the push to charge more for some bits than others. He’s right on the mark as usual: ” Price discrimination in the middle of the network is a risk to new app discovery and to free speech.”

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Matthew Gross, the Dean campaign’s
blogger-in-chief, has apparently found
something disagreeable in JOHO…

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Seth Gordon suggests that the metaphors by which we talk about computer security are misleading. It’s not war and it’s not a disease. It’s a con game.

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Isenblog is berging, um, Isenbulge is begging, damn, blosenbleg is icing. Well, just check it out for yourself. It’s darn fine.

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The police in North Carolina are looking for the person who successfully used a $200 bill with a photo of W on it to pay for some stuff. The Smoking Gun has the picture of it. (Thanks to Dave Wasser for the link.)

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My friend Ross Knights combines two recent Web thangs:

Wlel sviher me tmiebrs, mteay! Ahrgrrh.

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Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: humor Date: September 18th, 2003 dw

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